Free Princesses by Flora Fraser Page A

The Queen, Christopher Lloyd, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, Hugh Roberts, Director of the Royal Collection and Frances Dimond, Curator of the Royal Photograph Collection, for much generous help. I am in addition grateful to many other curators and members of staff at the Royal Collection, including Siân Cooksey, Martin Clayton, Gay Hamilton, Shruti Patel, Prue Sutcliffe, Bridget Wright and Margaret Westwood. I also record my thanks here to Susanne Groom, Joanna Marschner and their colleagues at Historic Royal Palaces for much helpful advice.
    The six daughters of George III corresponded mightily all their lives. So
Princesses
is a book in which I have drawn heavily on private British family papers, and I would like to thank all their owners for allowing me to make use of them, and many of them for memorable hospitality. Among those I especially thank are: Sir Peter and Dame Elizabeth Anson, the Marquess of Bute, the Earl of Home, Richard Jenkins, the Earl of Pembroke, DavidScott and David Smythe. I am in addition indebted to, among others, Robin Harcourt Williams, Andrew Maclean, Charles Noble and Michael Shepherd for their professional advice.
    I am also most grateful to the archivists and staffs of all the County Record Offices where papers relating to the princesses are deposited, and whom I visited or corresponded with. Carl Harrison at Leicestershire Record Office, Sally Mason of Buckinghamshire County Archives, and David Rimmer at Gwent Record Office are among others who have given me great assistance.
    I owe thanks to Michael Borrie, of the British Library Department of Manuscripts, to Christopher Kitching, of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and to Ian G. Brown, at the National Library of Scotland, for advice about the whereabouts and extent of various collections of papers. I would also like to thank the staffs of the British Library, of the London Library and of the Public Record Office for their help, and John Saumarez Smith of Heywood Hill for much generous advice.
    I would like to thank Prince Ernst August of Hanover for permission to consult family papers, and for an illuminating discussion about the House of Hanover in Germany and in England. Two of the princesses married into other German royal families, and I would like to thank Dr Iris Reepen for her great assistance to me on two memorable research trips. We saw castles, collections, archives and curatorial departments from Bad Homburg and Frankfurt to Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg and, on the other side of Germany, to Greiz in Thuringia.
    Thanks are also due, for help with manuscripts in Germany, to Eberhard Fritz at the House of Württemberg Archives in Altshausen, to Johann Krizsanitz of the House of Hanover Archives in Hanover, to Anja Moschke of the Thuringian State Archives in Greiz, and to Gerta Walsh and Ursula Stiehler of the House of Hesse-Homburg Archives in Bad Homburg. In addition I would like to thank the staffs of the State Archives in Stuttgart and in Hanover for their help and advice. Thanks also go, again in Europe, to Monique Droin-Bridel in Geneva and to Silke Redolfi at the Fundaziun de Planta, Samedan.
    In the earlier part of the twentieth century British royal documents were purchased with enthusiasm by American collectors and bibliophiles, and innumerable letters of the princesses and their circle then found their way across the Atlantic, some of which I have consulted. I am most grateful to Roger Horchow for arranging introductions for me at various American libraries; to Stephen Parks and his colleagues at the Beinecke and Lewis Walpole Libraries, Yale; and to Robert Parks, Inge Du Pont and others atthe Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, for help and advice. I am also grateful to Stephen Crook and others at the Alfred A. Berg Collection in the New York Public Library.
    I would also like to thank, among others who have shed light on the princesses’ artistic output and on their sittings to artists: Henry Adams,